Coding without expectations vs. intentional intensity

Last updated Sep 20, 2023 Edit Source

• Productivity

In my learning journey, I’m noticing there’s two schools of thought to approaching the prerequisite “10,000 hours of mastery”.

• This approach focuses primarily on one’s tenacity and effort.
• It adheres to the deep work formula proposed by Cal Newport in his work “Deep Work”
  • High-Quality Work Produced = Time Spent * Intensity of Focus
  • A mentioned anecdote from the book is Theodore Roosevelt’s multi-achievements at relatively young ages. It explores how it was likely made possible, through peer accounts of how he would be working on several things simultaneously, in bursts of intense deep work sessions.
• David Goggins often proposes the concept of “callousing your mind”, asserting that individuals need to be intentionally exposed to friction and discomfort; and in doing so, would develop the toughness to increase capacity to create value.

Though I have had many productive results from approaching work sessions with this perspective (CS50!), the uncompromising standard for input intensity and result output can also set things up for failure. Specifically, consistently not meeting targets can have an accumulative demoralising effect; whether due to a persistent bug, mental/focus blocks, or simply poor estimation of the task at hand.

This is accumulative effect is compounding, and creates a negative feedback loop – which arguably makes for an ineffective system by design.

This concept was first introduced to me by YouTuber BigBoxSWE. During a time when I was banging my head against a bash script, stubbornly telling myself I needed to finish it yet severely underestimating the scope, it ended up spilling over multiple days, into weeks. It opened up my perspective to the value in having a flexible approach.

It made learning, practice and the general pursuit towards my learning goals demotivating, and lead to way more friction to just get seated and to start.

In this instance, I took the advice and decided to spend some time doing CodeWar problems. Each solved problem provided a nice dopamine boost, and gave me the confidence to throw myself back into the head-banging stuff.

Though, there’s likely a trap in here that could lead oneself into “feeling productive” without actually creating meaningful, high-quality value output – to this point, this (and the former) approach would only generate it’s most effective value when used within an en effective, alternating strategy guided by intuitive feeling.

The critical thing is likely that you keep going, and do so consistently. The best application of these two schools of thoughts is likely to use both interchangeably, based on factors such as time/stamina/focus available – mentally, you won’t be in a single static frame of mind along the journey after all, and will have moments where you’re more motivated or available than others.